7th October - Today's News

Tropical Storm Grace is no more - though her remnants did give us in Evesham our first decent rain in weeks - indeed 50% more in 24 hours than we had in the whole of September.

But worth linking to a good report from Accuweather's Jesse Ferrell: Tropical Storm Grace off Europe coast! Grace was undoubtedly an unusual storm, and only lost her TS designation when crossing the continental shelf into the shallow waters off the coast of southern Ireland.

Meanwhile TS Henri has briefly formed in more traditional waters off Miami but looks unlikely to stay around long. A week into October and we've only seen 8 named storms (just!) of which just 2 (Bill and Fred) became hurricanes. I can't see any major storms developing now.

The average ice extent over the month of September, a reference comparison for climate studies, was 5.36 million square kilometers (2.07 million square miles) . This was 1.06 million square kilometers (409,000 square miles) greater than the record low for the month in 2007, and 690,000 square kilometers (266,000 square miles) greater than the second-lowest extent in 2008. However, ice extent was still 1.68 million square kilometers (649,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 September average. Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 11.2 percent per decade, relative to the 1979 to 2000 average.Sea surface temperatures in the Arctic this season remained higher than normal, but slightly lower than the past two years, according to data from Mike Steele at the University of Washington in Seattle. The cooler conditions, which resulted largely from cloudy skies during late summer, slowed ice loss compared to the past two years. In addition, atmospheric patterns in August and September helped to spread out the ice pack, keeping extent higher.

Comments

Hmmm...Amazing "Grace" forming over 21-23C waters...I think the jury is still out if thissystem was tropical, possibly a hybrid withboth tropical, subtropical and polar elements,it mostly looked like a polar low with its roundness and eye at 986 mb as lowest pressure,I'm eagerly waiting for the post-analysis...

Hi Staffan - I've just added a satellite image of Grace taken yesterday lunchtime. Yes, it does have a polar low look to it.

I'll keep a look out for any further discussion on Grace - I know there is some post analysis going on on UKweatherworld but whether we'll reach any conclusion on what Grace really was remains to be seen. Still, a nice system with which to bring to an end a rather boring spell of weather here in England!

The idea of this blog is to produce a regular round up of global weather and related news stories which then acts as an archive. Some links may be lost in time but by searching the original headline on Google it should be possible to find related stories. Additionally, it gives me somewhere to add my own thoughts on some stories, as the mood takes me.